Warburton’s Maryland – finished!

Finishing a model is not at all a frequent occurrence, and the completion of this one is particularly sweet. This is the somewhat famous Azur 1:72 Martin 167 Maryland, finished in the colors of Adrian Warburton’s machine on Malta in1940.

The plane, Maryland 114, has a very colorful history. It was one of the aircraft delivered before the fall of France and had operated briefly against the Germans. Once the Germans had prevailed, it was given to the Vichy French and operated briefly with GR I/22, reconnaissance unit in the south of France. Then, a French crew defected to Gibraltar with the machine. It was hurriedly supplied to 69 Squadron, and Warburton used it to map the entire coastline from Tripoli to Benghazi in a single sortie. It was also used in a mission where Warburton spotted an Italian airfield and strafed it, destroying three SM.79s.

 He also flew the Maryland on the pre-strike scouting mission to Taranto, where he made two low passes: one to photograph the ships there, and a second to dictate the names of the ships so the crew could write them down! After the war moved past Malta, Warburton eventually was posted back to the U.K. and in 1944, disappeared while flying an F-5 Lightning. The wreckage of the plane and Warburton’s remains were only discovered in 2002 – just after I started the model.

 The kit itself is just okay. There are some major shortcomings – the side windows are molded as part of the fuselage, the landing lights are solid on the wings, and worst off the scoops on the fronts on the nacelles are blocked off, and not particularly deep. I had to carve all these things open, for starters. I’d love to write an article on this, but the construction was spread over so many years that the photos of construction are scattered all over the place – on computer hard drives that no longer work, on chemical photographic prints and all over the place. That’ll make a really good article difficult.

 But the model came out pretty well. All the extra work is hardly visible, but I know it’s there, and that’s what matters. It’s been a long journey to this point, but it’s been worth it.

Maryland: one good break, one bad one

Last Friday, the incomplete Maryland actually won the Model of the Month award at the Silicon Valley Scale Modelers meeting, which I thought was a real honor. The plane still needs the canopy, gear doors, bombardier’s hatches, machine gun, DF loop, landing lights and so on. I thought I might have a chance next month, but certainly not this month!

Then, on Sunday, my wife broke the model.

It wasn’t terminal . One of the gear struts broke off at the mounting point; it sheared the original plastic pin I’d added, but came off otherwise totally intact. All I had to do was drill the strut and add a new pin – this time a length of paperclip – and drill a corresponding hole in the wheel well. The Azure kit’s landing gear attachment points are a joke – they look like ejector pin marks more than a place to glue any parts – so the repaired strut is now much stronger than it was before.

How did it get broken? Totally innocently. Elizabeth moved the model in its box from her desk to mine and it slipped off its protective cradle, landing one wing low and snapping its gear. It’s actually a nice reminder that I should build a custom box with form-fitting foam cradles before I try to transport it – like to the nationals!

Mitigating Maryland mistakes

Oh, my golly. The Maryland is now on final approach to completion, and I’m starting to get really nervous. The closer it gets to completion, the more goofy little things that threaten to de-rail me. Before I start to lay out my tale of terror, let me show you what I’m talking about. Here’s the Maryland, with the dullcoating and wash, and all the masking removed from the clear parts and engines:

Looks good, right? Well, here’s how it could have gone wrong.

After I dullcoated the model, I took off the masking. The small windows on the sides concerned me, and I even scored around them with an X-Acto to prevent the masking from lifting the white stripe decal. Guess what? The masking lifted the white stripe decal – it ripped a quarter-inch of the decal clean away. I have come far enough not to have started crying or hurl the model across the room – instead, I set the model down, took a break, and then came back with purpose and masked and painted the damaged area of the white stripe with Humbrol matt white shot through my Paasche VL. Problem fixed.

Okay, on to the rest of the clear parts. The ventral window was shockingly mistake-free, as was the windscreen. The glass nose had me concerned, though, and, as it turned out, I had reason for concern. Much to my amusement, there were a couple of frames that I forgot to expose when I masked the nose. Again, I didn’t get upset – I just masked those individual frames and painted them. No problem.

Once I get the frames squared away, I’m going to put the aircraft on its landing gear, which will be a big step toward completion. Then, I have to make the canopy, the hatches for the bombardier’s position, and add other bits. The wing lights will be fun – I have to find four fairly small MV lenses for this area, and I’ll probably cover them with some kind of transparent tape.

I’m learning a lot on this build – mostly, that nothing that goes amiss is really un-fixable. That’s a good lesson for a modeler to learn.

Markings on the Maryland!

While watching the debate over the health care bill last night (yeah, I’m that kind of news junkie), I applied the decals to my Martin Maryland. On Friday night, Mark Schynert and I discussed just when a model transforms from a chunk of plastic shaped like a plane into a representation of a real plane. Mark said it was when the propellers went on (not that he thinks jet models never look real – he just rarely builds ’em!). I said it’s when the decals go on. Here, Mr. Schynert, is exhibit A:

These decals came from a lot of sources, but the most important source was Norm Filer. Norm made the “2,” the white bar and the devil logo on the tail from the profile in the AJ Press book on the Maryland. (The breaks in the white bar are where the windows are – windows I cut from the solid fuselage and added about eight years ago when this all started.) The other decals came from various RAF sheets, and the roundels, amazingly enough, came from the kit sheet. It’s now ready for a wash, followed by the flatcoat and some weathering.

Now that the markings are on… the Maryland IS a good looking plane!

Masking a Maryland

It has been a while since I worked on my Martin Maryland – since August, to be exact. That was when Norm Filer delivered a set of custom-made decals for my model, an act which I have no means to repay (other than the usual resin items!). My delaying has resulted in the news that Special Hobby plans to put out an “Adrian Warburton Edition” of the kit with the same markings Norm made for me, so I need to get cracking. (You can all thank me for that – clearly my model karma made Special Hobby do this famous Maltese Maryland.)

Before applying the decals, however, I’m tightening up the camouflage. My friend Ben Pada, the last time he saw the model, asked in his familiarly brutal Hawaiian-accented way, “you gonna clean up the camouflage, right?” At the time, I wasn’t, but Ben convinced me that I should. The feathered edges were just not sharp enough, so I went and masked the French khaki and French chestnut brown areas – leaving the oversprayed areas un-masked – and feathered on some French dark blue gray. When the masks were removed, those spray lines were indeed tightened, with a hint of a feathered edge. Pretty convincing – although I have a few spots to touch up, and I have to get the lower surfaces’ camouflage lines masked and resprayed yet, too.

Then, I’ll gloss the model and decal it and get into overdrive toward completion. The props, wheels and turret are done; I’ll need to make up the bombardier’s upper and lower clamshell doors and the pilot’s canopy, and I desperately need to address the wing leading edge lights, but that will come later. This will also be a fairly heavily weathered machine, so some silver pencils and pastels will come into use.

The landing gear struts were almost comically simple in real life, so they’ll just need some clean up and some simple brake lines. I also have to add the observer’s seat belts. I keep forgetting to do this; now, it’s going to be like a game of Operation fitting the belts to the seat. Just another minor issue to contend with.

I’m still not used to the French camouflage – but this is the first French camouflage-clad plane I’ve ever built. When the markings are on, I’ll be more comfortable with it.

Hopefully, I can get the model decaled by the end of day, Saturday. If I do that, it’ll be nothing but finishing work until the Maryland is done.

From not enough time to too much

I had some rough news last week – I was laid off. It’s a bummer for many reasons, including the obvious financial reasons, but also because I was very proud of what I’d built at Inside CRM. My departure probably means the company will let it lay dormant and go extinct.

So, while hunting for a new job, I have time on my hands to fill. How much? Today I packed up dozens of Obscureco parts into their little bags and boxes. This is work I used to dump on my nieces when they would visit from Egypt. Yes. I was importing foreign child labor. (Of course I was paying said labor ridiculously well, but the point was that I didn’t have to do it myself.) I received a box from Bill Ferrante filled with freshly-cast wings, and they’re all in their boxes – in fact, a bunch are on their way to Roll Models.

And I did get a little good news – Norm Filer has graciously done the markings I need for my Maryland, namely a stylized, drop-shadowed “2” and a distinctive devil-throwing-a-bomb logo for the tail. Mike Grant also quickly volunteered to help with this, which shows just how many wonderful people there are in the hobby of scale modeling.

Now, I could do something idiotic to get the Maryland into the nationals – gloss-coat it, throw on what decals I could, pack it and all the small parts, apply Norm’s decals in Columbus and then spray the model with canned dull coat, and finally stick on all the small bits. Voila! One certain to be cockeyed Maryland. Not going to do that. Instead, I started work in earnest on the master for a new Obscureco set, this one for the A-3 Skywarrior. I have the Rene Francillon book on the A-3, and the A-3 maintenance manual (with many, many revisions, showing what a plane goes through during a long life). Today, I made the first 1:72 toilet seat cover I’ve ever made (yes, there was a toilet in that small three-place cockpit), and I’ll be working on the rest of the cockpit before deciding how to handle the differences between the A-3B, KA-3B, EKA-3B and other variants. The control panels are really quite different on the co-pilot’s side, so I may make a two-part panel with optional right sides.

I’d also like to do A-3 wing with dropped leading-edge slats, but how I’d do that is difficult to say. It would be a huge part and it would drive poor Bill crazy casting them – plus, I’d have to get bigger boxes. While it’s a neat idea, I don’t know if it’s a practical one. Any input on whether I should give it a go? Let me know.

Martin Maryland in its warpaint…

This weekend I was able to paint my Azur Martin 167 Maryland. This was a momentous occasion – I’ve been working on this since it came out in 2002 (this I know only because Chris Banyai-Riepl wrote up this review on Internet Modeler  at the time). That makes seven years of toil and tears on this kit; when you get that kind of time invested, you want it to come out just right.

The model’s not just right yet – another round of touch-ups to the camouflage in all four colors is on the way – but it is looking a darn sight more finished right now. Here’s the state that the Maryland’s is in right now:

 

 

The changes that will be made are to add a wavy demarcation in green (actually, French Khaki) to the left nose, to touch up a patch on the left fuselage side in dark French blue gray, to touch up an area right below the wing trailing edge in light French blue gray, and to make the vertical fin chestnut brown instead of khaki. The rudder will be painted dark earth; my thoughts are that the defecting Maryland had its tricolor tail painted over in the closest match that the British had handy. The photos suggest that the plane did not have the yellow and red Vichy markings, but instead the more subtle white stripe down the side – that’ll be the next thing painted, using my favorite white enamel, Humbrol #34 matt white.

While I love that Humbrol color, the rest of the model is finished in Model Master enamels, sprayed freehand through a Paasche VL with a fine tip. I don’t have a regulator on my compressor, but I reduced the psi by partially unscrewing the air hose. (Did I tell you my real job is writing about technology? That’s why I use such stone-age techniques sometimes.) Thinned properly, the paint gave me a nice, fine spray pattern, although I had some coverage issues with the French Khaki at first.

The only screw up was that I started painting before I’d cleaned up the scoops at the tops of the engines! No problem – my pattern avoided them with the French Khaki and I was able to sand them up suitably before returning them to dark blue gray in the first touch-up round.

I’m really looking forward to getting this model glossed and decaled – It will certainly look different from anything on my model shelf. I’m also sneaking up on a British twin-engine bomber collection (Mosquito, Beaufighter, Maryland and… Hampden? Wellington? Ventura? Beaufort? Blenheim? Marauder? Mitchell? Havoc? Whitley? Manchester?). I only need five, so I’m getting in the ballpark.

Of course, at the pace I work, my fellow modelers will have time to get their entries ready to compete against me at the 2023 nationals. Start building!

A Maryland of many colors

Two weeks ago, I masked all the clear parts on the Maryland and stuffed tissue into the open cockpit, turret and bombardier’s hatches, then preshaded all the panel lines (and boy, does this plane have a lot of panel lines – at one point, I just figured I’d paint the whole model black!). Masking the bombardier’s windows was also a real blast – another reason we don’t see as many bombers as fighters on the model display table, I’m sure! That done, it means there’s only one logical next step: painting the camouflage scheme. I’m very excited about this; I’ve never painted French camouflage, and the idea of essentially a free-hand, make-it-up-as-you-go camouflage pattern (I have one photo, of the left side of the plane) is pretty liberating. (And the French needed liberating, let me tell you!)

Sorry about that. I’m not really given to French-bashing – especially of their air force, which was largely the victim of atrocious civilian government meddling before the fall of the country in 1940. They produced some neat airplanes – the Breguet 693  is one of my favorites – but they had too many unique types, meaning that manufacturing and tactics were all a big jumble, and faced with the Germans their organizational failings were magnified. That said, my Maryland will wear French camouflage (and have a backward throttle – the French ran their engines by pulling back, and hut them down by pushing forward), but it’ll have British roundels and fin flash.

The plane in question survived the German invasion and became part of Escadre de Reconnaissance 22 flying out of Rabat, Morocco. On Feb. 10, 1941, the crew of Sgt. Brugere, Lt. Girardou and Sgt. Varasseur took off on a patrol and quickly zipped across the Straits of Gibraltar, where they landed to join the Free French. The Maryland was a welcome addition, too, and it was ferried to Malta, where it was used to keep tabs on the Italian fleet. (I’m not a real big fan of the Vichy schemes; they’re colorful, but the idea of an Air Force flying in service of its conquerors is somewhat distasteful to me.)

As I said, I have one photo of one side of this plane, so I have to do a little interpretation. I’m going to finish the rudder and the cowlings in dark earth; that would be a logical thing for the RAF to do to cover up the tricolor on the tail and the yellow and red cowlings. Photos support the rudder idea. Model Master enamels will provide the various French camouflage colors. It is as bit amazing the plane flew with these colors from Morocco; the shades are awfully dark and, er, wet for that locale. For northern France? Okay. For Morocco? Not exactly. Then again, the RAF sent it merrily to Malta, which is not known for a broad palette of landscape colors, so expediency had its place.

Also, the real plane was pretty badly chipped; I’ll render that with Prismacolor pencil.

Most of the rest of the model – the gear, the propellers, the turret, the hatches – is finished. It’s amazing what you can accomplish while trying to avoid painting! I still have to work on the cockpit canopy and fashion a boarding ladder, and I may make a base/diorama to display it on (using decapitated Luftwaffe desert figures with RAF head transplants for my Malta-based pilots). But this is many years in the making, so the painting will be something to celebrate. I’ll try to get photos up as the various colors go on…

Random pre-holiday stuff

Some collected odds and ends:

Memorial Day Weekend always involves these two things: 1. the flag on the front of the house all three days and 2. watching the Indianapolis 500 from start to finish. The rest of the weekend, I’ll improvise.

Negotiations with Elizabeth proved fruitful and I will have two and a half hours of uninterrupted scale modeling on Saturday.

In a related note, the backordered Falcon canopy set that includes the Maryland’s canopy arrived from Roll Models this week. Thank you, Roll Models! I was afraid this would have gone into back-order purgatory, but you coaxed the New Zealanders to send a new order. I am grateful. (I also got some photoetch for my Mustang, the new A-1 Skyraider units book from Osprey and Aires’ English Electric Lightning exhaust set, so there’s a little preview of future activity.)

Gene Martin sent me eight excellent photos from his time in the 379^th Fighter Squadron, 362^nd Fighter Group from around April 1945. Four showed him and his living conditions (tent!), and four showed his P-47 “Bonnie Lynn.” If you’ve seen the Aeromaster sheet with “Bonnie,” this is the same plane, only with the addition of “Lynn” to commemorate Bob Shaw’s daughter, a yellow surround to the codes and a yellow cheat line down each side of the anti-glare panel. It is one sharp Thunderbolt. I will start bugging Roy Sutherland of Barracudacals immediately.

Gene also sent his log book, which helped fill in a lot of blanks regarding the 379^th, and I also had an e-mail interview with Joe Hunter of the 378^th which I’m currently working into the text. Joe provided details on his three victories and some great insight into the ground attack mission. Totally invaluable stuff! I’ve said that the only bad part of finishing a book is that I no longer have an obvious excuse to talk to these veterans, and that’s very much the case with this project.

Last night I picked up IBG’s Chevrolet C15A No. 13 General Service Truck in 1:72; I believe I saw a long-bed version of this vehicle at El Alamein (actually, a Ford-manufactured version of this vehicle; the two companies used a common cab pattern) and again in photos of the 332^nd Fighter Group’s ground crews. It might make a nice conversion and diorama item. Here’s the truck in Egypt:

 

 

I took a lot more photos of this vehicle (and a second one like it that had been turned into a half-assed APC with the addition of two sheets of 1/8-inch steel  around the bed) not knowing what it was or whether a kit existed. This particular vehicle was apparently found on the Libyan border around 1998, with the driver’s body still in it and the bed loaded with supplies and ammo. After it was towed to El Alamein and the wiring harness was replaced and some oil was added, the engine actually turned over. The major difference between the cab here and the kit is the Ford logo in place of the Chevrolet bow tie!

Canopies, figures, clay pigeons and cartoon characters

The leap of faith I took when I opened the pilot’s canopy of my Azur Maryland was that I’d be able to get my grimy mitts on Falcon ClearVax No. 30. This 1:72 set has canopies for U.S. planes in RAF service, a selection that truly shows the creativity Falcon has in odd groupings for its vacuformed transparency sets. This included a canopy for the Maryland, and the plan is to use it to provide the swinging section of the cockpit glass, with the kit windscreen now ever so neatly blended in to the fuselage.

I ordered a set from Roll Models (And, of course, also bought a new AZ Models Breda 65, because you can’t just buy one thing – that would be wrong!) and waited. The box showed up and I was delighted at the Ba 65 – but the canopies are backordered. I emitted a Charlie Brown-line “AAAAUGH!” (after donning a yellow polo shirt with a black zig-zag line on it, of course) and lamented my fate. (If anyone has a spare to offer, I can trade some resin for it…)

Not a big problem – I went to work instead on a Preiser USAAF pilot figure in 1:72, changing the basic color of the uniform to a grayer shade of brown (it’s now too dark) and tightening up the borders of the Mae West. I have to figure out what this guy is reading – the figure has separate arms clutching a map or clipboard or copy of “Stars and Stripes” – what, exactly, it is I haven’t yet determined. He has his sleeves rolled up, so I’m thinking Pacific Theatre, so perhaps a nice predominantly blue map would work. I’ll print one up on my computer and glue it to the arm/document section before I add it to the rest of the figure (who is currently disarmed, so to speak). I’m also thinking of adding a knife in a scabbard to this guy’s hip – I wouldn’t go flying over New Guinea or the Philippines without that basic bit of kit. If I can find a sidearm in a holster, that may go with him, too.

And one more thing. About the Breda 65: I now have three kits of this machine, which was the Ford Pinto of World War II aviation – not much to look at, but also not very safe for its occupants. When Italy declared war on Britain, a officer in the Reggia Aeronautica was ordered to retrieve the Ba 65s from the various scrapyards and aircraft dumps the machines had recently been sent to. That’s right – they were on their way to being chopped up and melted down until someone got the brilliant idea of using them in the Western Desert. The idea of flying one of these obsolescent crates, with their slow speed and their weird 90-degree windscreens and their lumbering size, against Hurricanes and Spitfires is terrifying. Many a British ace won his title by downing a couple of these manned clay pigeons.

Why do I want to build one? Well, it has a brutish quality to it, and it must have taken some real guts to fly one against the RAF. I got the Azur kit several years ago and started researching it, and fully planned on building one before this new kit came out (which includes the strange grill-like cockpit floor as photoetched brass). Another plus: the unit I want to depict used the Big Bad Wolf from Disney’s Three Little Pigs as a logo on the tail, and I like the idea of someday doing a Disney collection – Italian, German, British and American planes all used Disney characters as art at some time, with some Venturas and Vegas getting art applied by Disney artists themselves. The range could encompass AVG Hawk 75s, Galland’s BF 109E, Emerson’s P-51D, B-17s and B-24s, Wildcats and Thunderbolts (thanks to Disney-designed logos) and this odd Italian aircraft.

You do have to wonder why they picked the Big Bad Wolf, though. The guy wasn’t very smart, certainly was not nice and ended up having his ass kicked by some pigs. There had to be better Disney characters to use as a mascot, even in 1940.